“We started to see a through line that many in our generation became politicized through a combination of life experiences and listening to hip-hop music. In the late 80s and early 90s conscious hip-hop was the number-one selling rap music and it shaped our views on the possibilities of conducting mass political education through culture work. We came across the documentary called All Power to the People where we learned of story about how a spoken word event called the Black House became a meeting point for Bobby Seale, Huey Newton (co- founders of the Black Panther Party) and host of national Black Power leaders (such as Amiri Baraka, Kwame Ture and H. Rap Brown) before they became infamous. We loved the idea of the Black House. Much like our building sessions, we needed an immersed social space to connect with our peers and move them to action. We saw this as a concrete way to build a larger “movement beyond our small orgs and collectives.